Animals and Greek Cinema: An Inquiry into the Nonhuman

This book offers a non-anthropocentric account of a national cinema. Drawing on cutting-edge developments in Animal (film) studies, the book gathers a wide range of species and genres to discuss the Greek cinematic animal. This en-tails recalibrating the readers’/viewers’ gazes to include particular nonhumans, often displaced in the frame’s margins. While acknowledging the cost paid in animal suffering for Greek cinema to rise, the book features instances of animal-human bonding. Combining close readings with interviews with directors, human actors, screenwriters, cinematographers, producers, special effects artists, and animal wranglers, this book proposes a paradigm of human-animal praxis, arguing that revisiting nonhuman images can lead to renewed ethical relations, and to less speciesist cinemas, film industries, and societies..

Nikitas Fessas owns a no-kill farm in Crete. He holds a PhD in Political and Social Sciences: Communication Sciences (focused on Film). He has worked as a film reviewer and has co-edited the volume Greek Film Noir (2022). Slavoj Žižek references him in two of his books.